68 JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [YOL. XIV. 



present day to claim our title to the credit of those services 

 which our Society has rendered in the past. 



If it had been at one of the Society's least nourishing 

 moments that I found myself called upon to pass its history 

 in review, I should have argued that history forbade us to 

 despair of it, and assured us that it was worth preserving 

 and handing on. But standing, as it is my good fortune now 

 to stand, at a point which in one respect — in regard of numbers 

 and of popularity — is, perhaps, the highest that the Society 

 has yet reached, the moral I am bound to draw is rather 

 this : that our only sound title to the respect of those who 

 come after us must be founded, not on our having amused one 

 another for the moment, but on solid work done and results 

 accumulated, and therefore on our securing not only the 

 patronage of numbers, but the disinterested services of men 

 of real learning and research. 



For the benefit of those — and they are the large majority 

 of us— to whom the earlier proceedings of the Society are 

 matters not of recollection, but of ancient history, I propose 

 briefly to describe the circumstances of its foundation, and 

 to indicate — so far as I have learnt it — what its original 

 character was. We shall then trace the chief vicissitudes of 

 its fortune, and commemorate the names of those benefac- 

 tors — for so they deserve to be called —by whom, after each 

 period of depression, it was revived. We shall take note in 

 passing of some of those Papers which appear — without 

 disparagement to others — to have been the most widely or 

 permanently valuable among our proceedings ; and we 

 shall observe how, in days before the different Scientific 

 Departments of the Public Service had been fully developed, 

 this Society anticipated their work, and fostered their 

 beginnings or drew attention to their necessity. In this last 

 connection we shall especially emphasize with a just pride 

 the Society's part in the formation of the Colony's Natural 

 History collections, and its title to a large share in the 

 credit and in the privileges of the magnificent Museum in 

 which we are now assembled. 



